If commenter Starfish only knew how accurate this comment is:
I saw this video earlier today, and I was convinced that this is John Cole’s life.
Sigh:
That is my existence of every minute of every day.
I laugh in people’s faces when they ask me if I ever get lonely living “alone.”
Baud
OMG that video is hilarious.
Omnes Omnibus
The dog and cat in that video seem to be having a blast.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: They are saving him from the news. It is a mitzvah.
Mnemosyne
We have reached that stage in a So Cal winter where the cats decide that our highest purpose is to be warm-blooded furniture, so they never friggin’ leave us alone.
ThresherK (GPad)
Found a Classical MPR (Mn public radio) holiday stream on Tune In Radio which will preserve my current levels of sanity. (Was gonna say “save” but let’s not go overboard.)
Spousal ThresherK comes home tomorrow, rehabbed her knee very well, so 3 days ahead of sked. I really wonder if her cat remember who she is.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mnemosyne:
Does not compute.
debbie
How does he stay so calm with so many teeth and claws so close?
amk
see the cat? always take the higher ground in a battle, you stupid dog.
Omnes Omnibus
@efgoldman: The actual John was a well-read patron of the arts type of guy. He might have been a successful king during the Renaissance. The thirteenth century was not kind to him.
NotMax
Absent operative phrase is “Knock it off!”
Authority unasserted is authority squandered.
Omnes Omnibus
@efgoldman: Look you, I know from winter.
Major Major Major Major
@Mnemosyne: Sam’s been awful cuddly up here too.
Felonius Monk
Since you are living “alone”, I would guess you probably have no need for V.I.Poo
I just can’t stop shaking my head every time I see this commercial on the teevee machine..
PaulWartenberg2016
I haven’t heard about Walter in awhile. I’m curious how his holidays are going.
Lizzy L
So, some of you may remember that back in August I got bitten by a neighbor’s dog: a 130 lb mastiff who pushed through a badly secured gate to get to me. I got a call yesterday from Animal Control. The dog was surrendered by the owner when it was explained to him that in order to keep it, he would have to register, vaccinate, neuter, and confine the animal. The neighbors are happy.
Since my o-o-p medical expenses were approximately $300, and I am completely recovered from all injuries, I chose not to pursue any legal action. It’s done. Thank you for your advice and concern.
Feathers
@efgoldman: I was in San Diego one November. Amazed that the stores in the (outdoor) mall were carrying the same coats, hats and gloves in San Diego that they were in Boston. The mall also had lights that projected blowing fall leaves onto the tiled floors in the 70 degree weather. I got a kick out of it. Came home to seven inches of snow and a downed tree in the backyard from the Halloween nor’easter.
Mnemosyne
@Omnes Omnibus:
There’s a reason I moved out here at 19 and never looked back.
And it doesn’t get quite cold enough for the cats to grow extra fur, so they spend the whole winter slightly chilly.
XR
@debbie:
I personally wouldn’t be worried about the dog’s teeth. Dog is obviously not trying to bite the cat but doing the “face biting” dominance game. Trying to impress the cat with the size of the teeth but cat’s not buying it. Cat’s doing something similar. Batting but not trying to injure.
Anyways, this is my life. 3 dogs & 5 cats that I officially own. Plus 3 or 4 cats who come and go for food and warmth. Plus the neighbor dog who wanders over for hotdogs and romping. Plus the possum who eats some of the outdoor cat food and sits around with the cats on the porch. It’s complete chaos.
Mary G
@Lizzy L: That’s a great outcome, congratulations! If any ambulance chasers see it, they will gnash their teeth.
MomSense
My dog just shredded my mail.
M. Bouffant
@Omnes Omnibus: It’s very chilly here. 56°F & it’s only 1932PST. Went out last night w/ a shirt & T-shirt on, had to go back & get a jacket. It may even be time to close the windows for the winter.
Having lived in Calif. most of my life, & SoCal for 43 yrs., I assume my blood is very thin.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mary G: Thanks for the facile cynicism. Most PI attorneys would point out that a case like that would cost more to litigate than it would recover in damages. They would likely discourage the person from filing.
Omnes Omnibus
@M. Bouffant: 36°F here and I am surprised by how warm it is for this time of year.
EBT
@Felonius Monk: I haven’t been this stunned by a video since I first saw Dahir Insaat, or possibly Ečstatica.
Lizzy L
@Omnes Omnibus: Indeed, the PI attorney I spoke to, who was extremely well-recommended and who was quite helpful, said basically that very thing. He neither discouraged nor encouraged me, but left the decision to my common sense. Seemed pretty clear to me.
rikyrah
I am literally crying after watching that video. I haven’t laughed like that since November 8th.
Omnes Omnibus
@Lizzy L: When I worked for a firm that did that kind of work, I would have explained that we could not take it as a contingency case, but, if the potential client felt strongly enough that he or she wanted to sue, our hourly rates were blah, blah, blah, etc. .
M. Bouffant
@efgoldman: Half-kidding. (All relative, y’know.)
One evening I was riding to work w/ an English co-worker who kept the radio tuned to the all-news station because he was worried about traffic (even well after rush hour); the weather weasel said “It’s a chilly 57,” & we both laughed.
Lizzy L
@M. Bouffant: I’m in northern CA (SF Bay area.) It was 38 degrees this morning when I took my morning walk. It’s about 45 degrees now. Cold for us, but not Chicago cold. (After 5 winters in Chicago, that’s pretty much my standard.) I wore a hood this morning, but no gloves. Closer to freezing the gloves come out.
M. Bouffant
@Lizzy L: Small claims court?
Omnes Omnibus
@M. Bouffant: Not worth the effort. Not everything needs to be litigated.
Mary G
@Omnes Omnibus: I’m sorry if you think I meant all attorneys. I did not. There was a set here in So Cal at least during the 80s and 90s, that advertised nonstop and took every case they could possibly get. I had a friend who got clipped on the rear corner on the freeway in a brand new pickup truck, causing it to roll over and over. He ended up hanging upside down by his seatbelt, and got a bit scratched up crawling out of the wreckage.
He had attorneys coming out of the woodwork and five business cards before he got home, from the tow truck guys and people who stopped. He went to the other guy’s insurance company the next day with his sales contract and they gave him a check for the full amount then and there. That was all he wanted. Attorneys still called him until the statute of limitations expired in a year.
Lizzy L
@M. Bouffant: I considered it. But the guy’s a Section 8 renter (government assistance) and my guess is it would be very difficult to collect on the judgment, I’d have to go through the county sheriff, it would take a long time — too damn much hassle. Had I been seriously injured, I would probably have made a different decision.
Mnemosyne
I like that we can now get rosé of Zinfandel, which is not the same as White Zinfandel (dry instead of sweet). It goes nicely with a sausage and bell pepper pizza.
Major Major Major Major
So on the way home from dinner we got yelled at by a homeless woman (“nerds!”). Anyway then I was putting away laundry and ended up singing to myself to the tune of Auld Lang Syne
“I wore these socks on Election Day
I’m going to burn them noooowwww…”
Omnes Omnibus
@Mary G: A lot of people shit on all PI lawyers as ambulance chasers. The vast majority are ethical professionals.
M. Bouffant
@Omnes Omnibus: I’d think a dog bite that cost someone $300.00 would be worth it just on principle, esp. considering what the result was w/ Animal Control. Sounds open & shut to me.
Lizzy L
@efgoldman: The dog’s owner has not once, since the incident, dropped by my house to ask how I was. He did say hello last week when I passed by his house on one of my daily walks. He’s kind of a dick.
Omnes Omnibus
@M. Bouffant: I file it under “shit happens.”
Mnemosyne
So if anyone wants a really crazy yet non-election-related read, I’m re-posting a story of Munchausen’s by Proxy that ended in murder. I remember hearing about this story when it first broke, but this one has more details now that the daughter has plea bargained. As I said last night, it seems like the prosecutors were able to strike a balance between mercy towards someone who was horribly abused and justice for a pre-meditated murder.
M. Bouffant
@Lizzy L: As a Section Eighter myself, O.K. then.
P.S.: Grew up on the Peninsula, but it was so long ago the only weather I really remember was the day it snowed.
EBT
@Mnemosyne: The American penal system will do her no good.
BillinGlendaleCA
I should clarify my comment in an earlier thread. It does not snow INSIDE B&N at the classy mall in town, it’s an outdoor mall and it snows for 5 minutes at 7pm and 8pm daily this time of year. It currently 46 degrees outside the cave, brrrrrr!
Mary G
@efgoldman: The good ones don’t have to advertise.
Omnes Omnibus
@efgoldman: I’ll just shut up on this then. You can all believe what you want. Lizzy L’s personal experience more or less matching what I said. The TV ads are the truth. FFS.
Lizzy L
@Omnes Omnibus: That’s pretty much where I filed it. But I did make sure to report the event to Animal Control, and I made sure they didn’t let it drop. As it turned out, the dog had gotten loose before, and wandered into nearby yards. We’ve got a lot of kids in our neighborhood.
@M. Bouffant: February 1976. I remember!
Mnemosyne
@EBT:
Honestly, it depends — so far, everyone in the justice system from the cop who arrested her to the prosecutor and the judge seem to be pretty sympathetic towards Gypsy. With good behavior, she won’t serve her full sentence.
Omnes Omnibus
@Lizzy L: I am glad that it worked out for you. You had a good attitude about the whole thing. The legal system cannot fix everything. I feel bad for the dog. He could have been better socialized so that he wasn’t dangerous. Shitty dog owners are shitty.
EBT
@Mnemosyne: Your article even mentioned that no one knows what if any psych care she will get after leaving prison. She gets to see a general prison psych once a week for I assume an hour? Ignoring how god awful puritanical some of our prison system is, that is a minimum of 7 3/4 years she by all rights should be spending in a facility. TBH saying jail is as good as psych care is a bit shitty.
khead
So, John, did you really fork over the $55 for Civ 6?
Just asking. For a friend.
Mnemosyne
@EBT:
Jail isn’t as good as psych care, but there’s that whole matter of premeditated murder and talking her unstable internet boyfriend into committing the murder while she sat in the other room listening.
IANAL, but she might have gotten a lighter sentence if she’d killed her mother herself, because she might have been able to claim some form of self-defense.
J R in WV
@efgoldman:
Our first winter in Key West, we saw the winter coats and hats at Sears, and laughed. Second winter, we told kid sister to bring coats to the airport when she picked us up at Christmas . She showed up in shorts and a tee shirt – we were freezing!! It was like 55 at Christmas…
Lizzy L
@Omnes Omnibus: Yes. I feel bad for the dog too. Not the dog’s fault. I had to stop taking my dog to the dog park because of the number of asshole dog owners: I would watch the way they interacted with their dogs, all the way from I-AM-THE-BOSS authoritarianism to You-Are-A-Human-In-A-Dog’s-Skin sentimentality, and it made me crazy. /rant
Scamp Dog
@efgoldman: I was in grad school at Texas A & M, and one Christmas break went to over to Ann Arbor, and saw that the U of M students were wearing the same level of winter jackets as the Aggies, despite the difference in temperatures. As a Michigan native, it was pretty funny to see how sort-of-coldish temperatures brought out the down jackets in Texas.
EBT
@Mnemosyne: Emotional chains are stronger than physical chains, regardless of what the court said that *was* self defense. Besides a sane person would realize that killing her would do nothing to shed those shackles.
Timurid
Satire is a rotting corpse.
Omnes Omnibus
@efgoldman: What is the word count for a rant? I tend to be terse. But the anger is often there.
Lizzy L
@efgoldman: What’s the word count for a rant? Asking for a friend.
Omnes Omnibus
@efgoldman: You said there was a a standard. You didn’t use the Potter Stewart dodge of “I know it when I see it,” until you were confronted. Bait and switch. Bad efg.
Lizzy L
I’m just going to drop this here. I’m a bad person.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/gingrich-mocks-romney-trump-dinner
Omnes Omnibus
@Lizzy L: Jesus titty-fucking Christ, there is a Laura Ingraham Show somewhere? I am going to go vomit now. I may not be back for days.
Lizzy L
@Omnes Omnibus: Thank you. I haven’t laughed so wholeheartedly in weeks.
Mobil RoonieRoo
That video is brilliant! ! Also it is the very definition of our lives……everyday.
BillinGlendaleCA
@efgoldman:
Sure, it’s not like you have to be a lawyer.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Day-yum. Trump’s version of “don’t call us, we’ll call you” must’ve been really bad. I wonder if they had Tiffany and Barron receive him in the playroom to tell him his presence in the cabinet would not be required.
workworkwork
@Omnes Omnibus: My father was a lawyer (general practice, small town firm) and he used to say of his profession, “It’s those 98% that make the rest of us look bad.”
Lizzy L
It’s hard to know what to say about Newt Gingrich. He takes “vicious and mean-spirited” to a whole ‘nother level. World class.
Lizzy L
@efgoldman: I think he stands out for the degree of concentrated spite he exudes. I find him completely loathsome, like something scaly and diseased, a creature out of a horror movie. He’s who Ted Cruz would like to grow up to be. Come to think of it, he could be a role model for quite a few of the Republican House members. The really repellent ones. Trey Gowdy comes to mind. Darrell Issa. Jason Chaffetz.
Mary G
@Lizzy L: Speaking of the devil, the recount has advanced to the point where Darrell Issa definitely won his seat back, by 0.8%. The reason California ballot counts take so long is that they take vetting provisional ballots seriously. Applegate responded by announcing for 2018 and asking me for more money. I gave him $5.
These Republicans are sneaky bastards. Everyone around here is up in arms about sober living homes, which they feel ruin property values. I had no idea Darrell had taken up with these NIMBYs and filed a bill against sober living homes to kiss up. Nobody told me because the sober living homes keep winning lawsuits based on the ADA and I am a known disability advocate. That made the difference.
Major Major Major Major
@workworkwork: My parents are lawyers and they both make that joke.
Steve in the ATL
@Lizzy L: That is good news. One day, I will tell you about my brief career as a celebrity dog bite lawyer. Highly entertaining, not at all lucrative.
Steve in the ATL
@Omnes Omnibus:
Whoa there, dude. Are you off your meds?
Mnemosyne
The Force Awakens is on cable. Fuck the haters, I liked it.
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
@Lizzy L: @M. Bouffant:
Ha! So does M. Colette, an SF native who was 15 at the time. He’s told me many a story about that dreadful day. Somehow the entire history of my New England childhood does not qualify me to tell him about snow. He has seen snow and he knows snow, does M. Colette.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I want to think JMM is exaggerating here, or that it was some goony Trump employee, but I have a feeling it was a “reporter”
GregB
Newt doesn’t seem to taking his demotion to Secretary of Go Get My Fucking Shine Box well.
Ajabu
I know the thread is probably dead but just want to point out that weather is relative.
In the Caribbean, our winter temps are usually 81º-82º in the daytime and down to about 70º at night. In, I think 2006, when I was teaching high school in St. Croix, we had a real aberrant day where the temperature dropped to about 68º. Every student showed up in quilted parkas and gloves. All in what you’re used to. I was freezing my ass off, too, but just went with a light jacket because I went to college in the states so I’m tough…
jenn
@rikyrah: Me, too! I have just forwarded it to all and sundry, because god knows we all need a laugh! ;*)
jenn
@Mary G: I’m glad to hear that Applegate’s declared this early – that’s fantastic. And if Issa had to win, it’s a good thing that it’s a squeaker – might make him moderate some of his assholery even a little – and at some point, we might need that little, who knows.
Anne Laurie
@Omnes Omnibus:
(Milne’s poems were classified as kiddy-lit, but they were actually written for his wife. I discovered their tongue-in-cheek edge as a teenager, reading them to my younger sibs.)
Anne Laurie
@Omnes Omnibus:
We haven’t had a proper hard freeze here north of Boston yet. I’m still picking ticks off the one dog who likes to burrow through the dead leaves. (Admittedly, it was a delightfully tick-free summer, because of the severe drought… anthropogenic climate change, ugh.)
Anne Laurie
@Lizzy L:
Gingrich was a pioneer in his field — that field being ‘pretend GOP candidate, full-time Wingnut Welfare grifter’. He only flirts with running for office as a form of ‘shelf capture’ for his NG brand.
That’s why he so “graciously accepted” that his role in a Trump presidency will be outside the cabinet. Going through confirmation hearings, or even drawing the media spotlight from his noisy bloviations to his conflicts-of-interest / past legal transgressions would cost him too much of his income — but spouting off like this for cable ‘news’ is more money in his pocket.
joel hanes
@efgoldman:
Boston to single digit temps.
North Iowa paper route at age 12.
February 1965 brought a solid week when the temperature never went above 20 degrees below zero F.
Then it dropped for a couple days, to minus 25 to minus 30.
Overnight low minus 32.
Froze the tips of my ears, several times.
Lakes and ponds had ice over three feet thick.
In the 1860s, settlers from Norway found that too balmy, so they went north to Minnesota
joel hanes
@efgoldman:
Boston
One of the unanticipated pleasures of Fallout 4 is that I’m developing an appreciation — nay, a love — for Boston and environs. It’s gone on the bucket list for retirement travel.
PST
@Omnes Omnibus:
Nor the twelfth:
Probably my favorite lines from The Lion in Winter, but there are so many.
Starfish
@EBT: You seem to be assuming that quality psych care is available outside of the prison system in Missouri. This assumption needs further consideration.
I am not familiar with the type of psych care available there, but I know that people in rural areas have a hard time finding quality treatment. And people with all sorts of horrifying psych conditions are kept at home untreated because the available treatment options are that limited and that bad.
Starfish
@Lizzy L: @efgoldman Now *that* might have been a proper rant.
Allan Anderson
My cat loves to taunt my dog by running through the room in the hope that the dog will chase. Great cat, totally ignores dogs, just turns his back and walks away. I’m convinced you have to have a dog and a cat to keep balance in the home.
Al Anderson
My cat loves to taunt my dog by running through the room in the hope that the dog will chase. Great cat, totally ignores dogs, just turns his back and walks away. I’m convinced you have to have a dog and a cat to keep balance in the home. Sorry about the double post, first time posting, got it figured now.
Frivolous
Probably not many will agree with this, but I think the guy in the video is quite handsome.
I figure I’d do him, so long as his cat and dog were not in the same room.
maya
That video brought back memories of Skipper, a yellow lab, and Sludge, a gray or Russian Blue that I had. Skip came to us as a known cat chaser and began his life with us by chasing Sludge up a pole. After a few days they became friends and played exactly like those two in the video quite often. Sludge was a pretty amiable cat, liked dogs and people but, would not tolerate any other cat around her anywhere, anytime. She had six claws on each paw so she was not to be trifled with.